Intel's 7th-generation CPUs (Kaby Lake) released in January this year, about 17 months after the preceding generation (Skylake)--a usual transition in the CPU market. However, Intel is ready to reveal its 8th-generation on August 21. And while we don't know of the release window quite yet, this announcement comes much sooner than what we'd expect.

The Kaby Lake processor family was announced this time last year and released five months later. If this next generation (Coffee Lake) follows suit, we could have new Intel chips in early 2018. This also means that Kaby Lake would be supplanted just 12 months after its launch; Intel CPU generations typically run an 18-month cycle.

There's reason to believe that the recent competition from AMD's Ryzen CPU family--which began its roll out in March this year-- is impacting what we see from Intel. AMD has been able to offer comparable gaming performance, more CPU cores for better multitasking and productivity, and competitive pricing.

I have maintained one very simple point- Intel is still the best choice for gaming in the PC space. This doesn't do anything to change that, unless they regress in gaming performance or performance per dollar under gaming.

If this comes remotely close to as crappy as Ryzen is for gaming, believe me I'd take them to task for it

I only want AMD to be competitive because INTEL are kind of assholes with their pricing and practices of disabling cores.

10000% agree. AMD is getting close but still a little too far off. I was looking forward to Ryzen until the benchmarks came out. Then came the gaming benchmarks. I'd be willing to risk compatibility for on-par or sometimes better performance as the initial benches showed but not for subpar gaming performance.

Of course I also have a feeling Intel, with all their ill-gotten gains, has a whole bunch of advancements in their back pocket they can roll out just to knock AMD down if it looks like AMD may actually be competitive again.

I've been running it at (just shy of) 4Ghz since it's inception with zero instability.

I'd love a new system, but it's really difficult to justify when this thing is still chewing up what I throw at it. I have no doubts the current gen is faster & more efficient, but I have no complaints.

I also hope that AMD catches up with Intel - they need some competition & it's good for the industry.

One year ago I upgraded my older i3 cpu with the best that would fit into my current motherboard, which is an i5-3570k that I got used for $139.98 on Amazon. It's just $5 cheaper right now. Works great for new games still and I have no regrets.